Texas Chuck wrote:trex_8063 wrote:
I used to be very much into poker, fwiw. I was a solid winning player for a few years; almost never play anymore, though I do still have an account and small bankroll on one online poker casino. That's the only game of strategy that I ever got REALLY seriously into.
Yeah before Black Friday that was how I was making my living. Was a tournament player mostly with multi-table SNG's mixed in to reduce variance plus I got bored with hold em and realized that mixed games tournaments were a super soft field because the tourney guys were bad at other games and the mixed games specialists had holes in their tourney strategies. Small fields, but they definitely helped offset tournament variance. Also would grind some lower stakes limit hold em($10/$20--couldn't beat bigger games) when I needed a tournament break plus I found it really improved my aggression and ability to make big folds.
Razz and PLO8 my best games. I absolutely sucked at regular PLO and couldn't ever master 2-7 though.
And yeah because it was how I made my living I put in a ton of work getting good. Tried playing live a few times after that, but found it so boring after 12-15 tabling that I wasn't playing my best and haven't really played in a long time so I'm sure some things have passed me by.
Oh wow, I was never good enough to be making my living at it, although I did give the idea serious consideration for brief while.
But I figured playing ~40 hours/week at the degree of multi-tabling I was comfortable with [which was no where near 12-15], and the small/micro-stakes I was comfortable playing......I
might have been able to pull about 25-30k/year. Not really a living. And that was before Black Friday.
I also didn't think I could handle the pressure or emotional toll that any lengthy run-bad would exert; not when I'm actually playing
for a living.
I didn't want it to stop being fun, you know?
I was pretty late to the party, too: MOST of my "poker career" came AFTER Black Friday. I only started playing
at all in 2009, and didn't begin taking it seriously [actually studying and putting in the work to get better] until around December 2009. And then our son was born, which put some serious limits on how much time I could play; and then of course BF was in spring 2011.
I kept playing regularly until about 2014, I think, but yeah.....the party was clearly over [even to my newb eyes].
So it remained a free-time hobby; overall I made enough to cover maybe a couple round-trip airfares.
To hear the older hands talk about how the tables
used to be, like say in 2007 or thereabouts.......well, it sounded pretty awesome. I was a few years late for that.
When you mentioned hold 'em tournaments and sng's, I assume you're talking about
NLHE?
I got started playing micro buy-in MTT's in NLHE, too. Did well [
after I'd taken some time to study and get serious], though I somehow found NL cash tables to be a completely different animal......and I sorta sucked there.
I eventually found my grove playing FLHE cash tables [usually 6max]; that became my primary game. Some of the same principles as NL, but much less psychology, more math. Instead of playing for stacks, you're looking for thin value at every turn. And you can play more hands with FL, which is more fun than constantly folding [in NL].
I liked Razz a fair bit, too; but hard to find sufficient games post-BF.
Don't know if I was any good. I just scrounged my old records [been a long while since I looked into those]: I was making approximately 2.8 BB/100 at $0.05/$0.10 FL Razz [though on a nearly insignificant sample size].
I otherwise have record of entering an $11 ($10 + $1) FL Razz MTT [which had all of 25 people entered, lol], but I didn't cash (records say I busted 7th of 25, only top 4 were paid).
I found Omaha (of which I mostly played FL, some PL) very frustrating. The variance was maddening. Is there actually higher variance than hold 'em? I don't actually know for sure, but it sure seemed like it to me.
Ultimately a very small sample I played of any version of Omaha, so it may just have been a lot of run-bad (I KNOW there was some: so many sessions of guys playing nearly every damn hand [coming along in raised pots with garbage, etc] and scooping in pot after pot). It happened enough that I basically gave it up.
Probably I sucked some, too.
I
barely ever played 2-7 lowball [and
definitely sucked at it].
Anyway.......yeah, poker's cool. I kinda miss it sometimes.
"Never argue with an idiot. They will only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience." -George Carlin
"The fact that a proposition is absurd has never hindered those who wish to believe it." -Edward Rutherfurd